INVESTIGATING THE IMPACT OF INFLUENTIAL CUSTOMER REVIEWS IN SOCIAL NETWORKS ON BUYING BEHAVIOR OF OTHER CUSTOMERS

One of the most commonly used words among product manufacturers or service providers is customer loyalty, which can be discussed in both traditional and electronic dimensions. The term, which has been popular since the 18th century, has been developed by commodity manufacturers and service providers with numerous models and tools. With the growth of Web 2 and the rise of websites and the growth of online shopping, however, the market size for manufacturers and service providers has increased, opening up the customer's hands and eliminating time and space constraints and ultimately increasing competition between manufacturers. With the advent of social networks, feelings and opinions about a product are quickly disseminated among consumers. On the other hand, service providers can communicate with their customers through low-cost social networks and use this tool to improve their brand status. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of influential customers' feelings and opinions in social networks on other customers in order to increase their sales and customer loyalty in electronic businesses. To this end, transactions data in an online store for 2017-2018 were collected from active customers on the store's social network site (Instagram), and then divided into 15-day identical time intervals and the effect of emotions sent by active customers on amount of other customers' purchases, the increase in the number of loyal customers and the number of new customers are analyzed using statistical methods. In order to measure the emotions of active users, their opinions are examined at each interval. If the positive emotions are above 70%, the polarity is positive and if the negative emotions are above 70%, the polarity is negative. The number of loyal customers, trivial customers, and new entrants was also extracted by the RFM method. Customers are divided into 3 categories of loyal, indifferent, and unfaithful customers based on the number of purchases, the amount of purchases and the last time of purchases at different time intervals using the clustering algorithm and also, the feelings conveyed by the activists of the social network Instagram about this online store during the mentioned time periods were examined. The results of this study demonstrate the positive effect of active customer sentiment on increasing the number of other customers and increasing the number of loyal and new customers.